Mary Tyrone’s Crisis of Agency: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Ordinary Language, and the Tragic Humanism of American Drama

Just about the only desire shared by members of the Tyrone family in Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the desire for a peaceful family life. Although each is acutely aware of how he or she threatens that peace, and each is alert to the threats posed by the others, the four are united in the effort to remain a family in spite of their collective destructiveness. The most strenuous efforts to preserve Tyrone family happiness come from Mary, who tries using performative language to assuage any threats to a happy family. So when Tyrone’s insecurity and anger begin to flare, she tells her husband, “You mustn’t be so touchy”; when concern grows over Jamie’s vices, she says, “He’ll turn out all right in the end, you wait and see.”¹ She repeatedly downplays the severity of Edmund’s illness by calling it just “a bad summer cold,” and she avoids questions of her sobriety constantly with utterances like “I’m quite all right, dear” (720, 741). Although each Tyrone is deeply flawed, Mary will brook no confrontation with the forces endangering family peace.

Such a drive to avoidance is understandable from Mary, who is expected to act as matriarch of a contentious family striving to keep the tattered threads of Tyrone happiness together. This task’s difficulty grows when compounded by her battles with addiction, guilt, and crippling fear that the worst is true of Edmund’s health. She seems to recognize how little can be done to repair the deep fissures weakening her family’s foundation, and so she turns to language in hopes of patching those fissures long enough to ignore their threat. When we consider all that Mary has suffered through since abandoning the convent for James Tyrone—the death of a young child, a painful pregnancy and resultant morphine addiction, an attempted suicide, and now the threat of losing Edmund to the same disease that took her father—it becomes difficult to fault her for whatever strategy she chooses to battle her and the family’s psychological demons. Peace and calm are Mary’s goals, and we should understand that desperation motivates her to whatever means she deems necessary to maintain a sense of serenity among her family, even if that serenity is falsely constructed through language.

Eugene O’Neill and Long Day’s Journey, however, are far from cooperative. Through a pattern of language and avoidance, the play indicts Mary as the catalyst of its tragedy. Placed by the Tyrone men’s shunning of responsibility in the unenviable position of tending to her family’s unity, Mary acts exclusively through language, responding to her challenges only with utterances that describe a peaceful family—one in which Edmund is not gravely ill and all the Tyrone men get along, for example—but she does nothing to support that condition. Ordinary language philosophy shows us that a speech act is a more extended process than uttering words without ethos or a commitment to support their performative work, and because Mary has neither she never succeeds in wiping away family problems with language. Since her family leans so much upon her for support, Mary’s ineffectual speech acts have the disastrous consequences of triggering this play’s tragedy, the final collapse of the Tyrone family.

The Tyrone men are foolish for putting their frail wife and mother in a position of such responsibility, and so blame for the conditions of this tragedy ought to be spread among its characters. Moreover, each man has habits that are destructive to himself and the family, and it is proper to censure their vices and lack of accountability. But Long Day’s Journey places the bulk of responsibility for the Tyrone family on Mary, asking her to nurse all its ills. Her failure thus makes her the agent of this tragedy, the force triggering its downturn. The men place their family on the precipice of tragedy with their unreasonable expectations of Mary, but she pushes the Tyrones and the...